Obama-knows-best goes bust

The president's calls for trust and patience are increasingly falling on deaf ears. | AP Photo

Strobe Talbott, a former Time editor and deputy secretary of state who now heads the Brookings Institution, calls Obama’s West Wing the “most White House-centric” presidency since Nixon’s — and says Obama’s behavior “is very reflective of that world view, the desire to control” decision-making.

“He knows that there’s no rule book for this,” added Talbott, who roomed with Bill Clinton when the two were Rhodes Scholars at Oxford. “There is no way to create a big casebook or user manual to run a system like this… The next president will inherit a different set of circumstances, the technology will change, the threats will too — circumstance is capricious…

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“Only big leadership judgment gets the best possible outcome.”

Obama is annoyed by the media firestorm over the program but only to the extent that it is bundled with a second-term blues narrative along with Benghazi and the IRS and Justice Department kerfuffles. He sees little chance of long-term damage, and his team has been heartened by polls showing a majority of Americans willing to make civil liberties trade-offs for security.

So far, Obama has resisted calls to address the American people directly — despite calls from critics like former Attorney General Michael Mukasey to deliver a “fireside chat” from the Oval Office on the topic. And Carney rebuffed efforts by reporters to get more information, repeatedly referring them to remarks in an anti-terrorism speech the president delivered last month and answers he gave during an impromptu news conference on Friday.

“I think it’s important to understand that you can’t have 100 percent security and then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society,” he said at an event in California that was scheduled as a chance to promote his health care law.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he added.

Obama aides also pointed to a host of accountability provisions embedded in the PATRIOT Act, including “exhaustive” National Security Administration reports to Congress, statutory restrictions on warrantless wiretapping and “targeting” procedures than ensure Internet surveillance is restricted to noncitizens and various judicial safeguards that confine most searches to large data sets rather than individuals.

But increasingly they are pointing to polls — and supportive statements from Republican hawks — to defend Obama.

And that makes some Obama allies uncomfortable.

“You know you are in uncharted territory when [House Speaker John] Boehner calling Ed Snowden a ‘traitor’ is the best news of the day,” said one senior Democrat close to the White House.